Wireless networks are increasingly used in a simulcast or broadcast on demand mode, as opposed to a one off unicast between two end users or a server and an end user. The simulcast or broadcast on demand may be done for a variety of purposes, ranging from scheduled newscasts, to entertainment, to education, to machine communication. In addition, the end users want the information, or are available to receive it, at different times. As a result, the backhaul link may end up needlessly transmitting the same information over and over.
In general, both nodes on either end of the backhaul link (e.g., a transmitting node on one end and a receiving node on the other) maintain the same storage (for messages and for label sets). So both nodes keep increasing in size until they reach 2{circumflex over ( )}K (where {circumflex over ( )} indicates raised to the power), if all bit combinations are used. The total storage is (N+K)×2{circumflex over ( )}K bits. There are dependencies in the choice of N and K. The compression benefit occurs when the transmitting unit sends a label of length K instead of a message of length N. Thus a large ratio N/K is desirable in that sense. At the same time, on average 2{circumflex over ( )}(N−K) messages map into a single label. In particular, if the mapping is linear in binary space, exactly 2{circumflex over ( )}(N−K) messages map into each label. If N−K is large, then there are more occurrences of the ambiguous case where the message labels match but the messages do not. In those cases, the transmitting node would have to resend the entire message, relying on scarce backhaul resources.